The Big Interview: Tom Voyce

Receiving the ball in a congested corridor yards from his own line, there didn’t seem much Voyce could do. But conscious of the need to try something, he began to run and soon opened the field by stepping inside Bristol’s Marko Stanojevic and Vaughan Going. Two other Bristol players, Mark Denney and Rob Higgitt, raced to cut him off but Voyce was too quick and scorched 95 yards to score an exceptional try.

“Text him,” said Lawrence Dallaglio in the dressing room afterwards, daring his teammate to inform the England coach that he, Voyce, was living up to his side of the bargain. Voyce did not need much encouragement and the message was sent to Robinson, something along the lines of “it might be worth watching the highlights of Wasps v Bristol”. Matt Dawson, like Dallaglio one of the senior men in the Wasps locker room, thought it was a bit cheeky to send the coach this message but Voyce knew Robinson would take it in the spirit it was sent. Not surprisingly, he did and was impressed by the player’s eagerness to state his case. If nothing else, it showed the rawness of his desire to play for England.

Soon after, Robinson picked the 22-man squad to play Australia. Twenty-two players but no Tom Voyce. A week later it was the same story against New Zealand before Voyce got his chance in the final game of the autumn series against Samoa. He scored two tries but they weren’t much compensation for a player who wanted to be involved in the biggest games. Voyce has just turned 25, Robinson and his club coach at Wasps, Ian McGeechan, told him he was still young and just needed to be patient.

“They were probably right but I couldn’t see it. I just wanted to be involved and I have always believed in my own ability, I feel I will do it if given the chance.

“When I was picked for England in the second Test against New Zealand and then against Australia on the summer tour of 2004, I thought I did okay. People said I was one of the few plusses from the tour. But then Clive (Woodward) resigned, Robbo came in and he went with the guys he knew best.

“It has been frustrating for me because, in my mind, this has been going on for a long time. I was very disappointed in the autumn and thought to myself that if I didn’t get a chance in this Six Nations, that was it, next season I would go off and play rugby in France or even New Zealand. I wanted to forget about it, and at the same time prove in another environment that I was a top-class player.”

On the bench against Wales last weekend, Voyce got his opportunity when Josh Lewsey suffered a shoulder injury early in the game. He came on, played well, scored a try and retained his place at full-back for yesterday’s game against Italy in Rome.

Perhaps the memory of his first experience of the Six Nations should be of that moment on the bench when he realised that Lewsey was in trouble. Dallaglio and Dawson were close by and both told him this was the opportunity he had craved and now he had to seize it.

As he headed towards the action, Voyce slowed a fraction to nod sympathetically towards Lewsey. “Take your chance, Voycey,” said his Wasps teammate. And so Tom Voyce entered the Six Nations, belatedly in his mind but determined that, for years to come, this would be his stage.

IT IS Friday afternoon at the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome, a five-star, 370-room hotel whose ceilings are frescoed and whose walls are covered with magnificent paintings. At the roof garden restaurant, the three-Michelin-star La Pergola, you can see the towering dome of St Peter’s. It is here the England team have stayed since Wednesday evening.

Four Leicester players walk through the lobby to an outside terrace where they will sit and drink coffee. Twenty-four hours before battle, they show their game faces, hard and focused. Voyce comes to our rendezvous with rather less seriousness, smiles by way of an introduction and brings to mind the old idea that self-doubt is the route to low self-worth. Voyce doesn’t do, has never done, self-doubt. This isn’t a criticism but a simple statement of fact.

He takes in the luxury all around and it is much to his liking. “Anywhere we go now, you are in places that a lot of ordinary people don’t get to experience. It’s a good place to prepare and it just gives me a great buzz.”

In the days before a game, relaxation comes easily. Yesterday morning he would have slept until after nine and would not have surfaced until 10. The same thought always hits him when he wakes on the morning of a big game: “Oh yeah, game today, you’ve got something to do.” He then puts the game out of his head and doesn’t consider it again until he arrives at the stadium.

They told him that, in the England set-up, he would have his own room from the Wednesday before a match, but he and Matt Dawson agreed to continue sharing. Dawson has been his guide, telling him what is expected, where he needs to be and what he needs to do. If there is a negative, it is losing to Dawson at golf on their PSPs (PlayStation Portables). But he’ll turn that around.

And even though it is Friday afternoon, so close to the game you can begin to sense the collective sombreness at the team hotel, Voyce is cool about the prospect of being interviewed. You wonder how he will feel on the morning of the game and he says “no different”.

“What I like to do is get up late, push breakfast back, bring lunch forward and eat just once, around 11 o’clock. If there’s a little run-out, or a walk-through of moves, that’s fine. Afterwards I’ll put on my iPod shuffle and listen to my music. I like everything and, on the day of a game, the iPod shuffle is great because it is so light around your neck and it decides what songs are played.

“There will be a really big game, we’ll be about to leave the hotel with everybody looking serious and this really mellow tune will start playing in my ears. A voice inside my head will say, ‘Tom, this is not right, big game and you’re listening to a girlie song’. But nobody else can hear and I want to hear it, so I listen to it anyway.”

On the team bus, he heads straight for the back where the team’s most chilled-out members sit. There Mark Cueto, Lawrence Dallaglio, Simon Shaw and he will shoot the breeze about ordinary things, keeping their voices low and suppressing their laughs. Voyce used to go on the pitch an hour before the game to practise his kicking, catching and passing, but he has given that up.

“You do it because you want to make sure everything is fine tuned but it doesn’t actually do that. For me it’s better to listen to some music, stay relaxed, I believe in my ability, why can’t I just do it from the first whistle? Sometimes I wonder if the other players think I’m not professional enough but I am, otherwise I wouldn’t be playing for England.”

To enact the ritual would be to pander to a doubt that doesn’t exist. And as for this long interview the day before his first start in the Six Nations, he wanted to do it. “I will tell you why,” he says earnestly, “when I was picked for the Samoa match and even more so over the last week, I have had a lot of media attention. The newspapers wanted to explain where I have come from and what has made me an England international. They wrote that it was down to my increased weight and size, I have put on almost 10kg over the past 2½ years and the increase has improved my strength. But that’s not what got me here, and I wanted to explain properly how I got to where I have.”

THURSDAY afternoon was his favourite time of the week. For at 3.30pm the bell would sound in the corridors of the comprehensive school at Penair in Cornwall and he would pick up his school bag and hurry away. Outside Michael, his father, would be sitting in his Citroën Xanthia waiting to take the boy to Bath. East on the A30, then north on the M5, three hours each way, sustained by his mother’s steak sandwiches and Cornish pasties.

He was 14 when they began the once-weekly pilgrimage and they did it for a year and a half before he was named on the bench for Bath Under-19s. He wore the same blue T-shirt top every week, the same shorts and the same black socks with the gold band of his native Cornwall. This is how I will be dressed every week, you must remember me.

He had always wanted to be a rugby player but living so far away from places like Bristol and Bath, not to mention London, worried him. “I loved Cornwall, still love it, but you are down at the bottom of England, a long way from everywhere.”

Michael was a doctor who came from Gloucester, married a Cornish woman and lived in Truro, a small town deep in the heart of Cornwall. They had two children, Tom and his younger sister Emily. Tom was the sportsman, Emily was good at her studies and, without overstating it, Tom was exceptional at sport, captain of the county rugby team at Under-15 and Under-16 level, a schoolboy county cricketer and an accomplished athlete. He played rugby for Penryn and then for Truro and, from the earliest days, they talked about him having a future in the game.

“Rugby is such a big thing in Cornwall that people look up to you if you’re good at it. You get that in a small place, I was conscious of people talking about me. It was like I was ‘The Kid’, I could do this, I could do that, folklore stuff. Rugby was what I wanted, but living so far away in Cornwall, I wondered how I would ever get to Bath or one of the London clubs.

“I couldn’t see it happening and that scared me, that really scared me. Was it possible? I heard about Graham Dawe, a farmer who had travelled up to Bath to play and became England’s hooker. For a time, he was my inspiration. I was conscious too of how living in Cornwall might affect you.

“You are sheltered there, almost cut off. You believe in yourself, in your ability, but you don’t see much of the outside world and you’re going to be less mature, less streetwise than guys from other places. Because I was cocooned in Cornwall, I didn’t know how the outside world worked and I was afraid I wouldn’t get the chance to find out.”

Then at the age of 14 he went to a summer rugby camp in Somerset and at the end, leaflets were handed out inviting participants to train at Bath rugby club. It was such a long way to drive for a training session but, still, he put it to his father. “The thing is,” Michael said, “they aren’t going to come down here to watch you,” and so began their Thursday journeys.

It allowed father and son precious time together. “Dad’s the odd one out in our family: he’s intelligent with a well-rounded education, a very astute man, very accomplished and we would talk endlessly on the way to and from Bath. If rugby didn’t work out, I wanted to be a farmer because I had spent a lot of my childhood working on my grandparents’ farm.

“We discussed what kind of farmer I would be. I was going to raise cattle but also have an arable side and use the machinery to do contract work for neighbouring farmers. Dad was such a fount of knowledge and Mum had packed so much food that we never needed to stop, there or back.

“And, 10 years later, there are newspaper articles saying ‘the move to Wasps made the difference’ or ‘the extra kilos have transformed him’ and there is no mention of my dad.”

After Penair comprehensive, Voyce went to King’s College in Taunton and then to agricultural college at Cirencester, but he graduated in rugby from Bath RFC and the game became his life. He played for the first XV at 19 and made his England debut at the age of 20 on the summer tour to North America in 2000. After that, however, he seemed to lose his way for two or three years.

“Maybe I thought I was better than I was, but I really struggled after an excellent debut season for Bath. There were plenty of people who thought I had a lot to learn. One of my difficulties was that I just couldn’t see where I was going wrong. A week or so ago there was something in a newspaper that reminded me of this.

“The newspaper was previewing the Six Nations and looking at up-and-coming players expected to make an impact in this competition. I was lucky enough to be named among them and there was a little commentary about me from Nigel Melville (the former Gloucester coach). His opening sentence was something like ‘I first came across Tom at Under-21 level he was the kind of player that not many people liked’. I don’t know why that was but I’ve always had it.

“I must have been doing something wrong. I know I can be an irritating person, a lot of my teammates tell me that, although they do it in a jovial way. Back then, I think I must have been getting above my station, maybe I had become a little arrogant. I believed I could score tries, I believed I could take people on the outside and I never thought I should hide my self-belief.

“If I could take someone on one-on-one, I wanted to do it. If I took him on the outside, why shouldn’t I feel pleased? Afterwards I would realise, I shouldn’t really have done that, but it was too late. That was something I had to shake off when I moved from Bath to Wasps. People who had reservations about me back then have a lot of respect for the player I have become, but the funny thing was I thought I got along with everyone, I wanted everyone to think well of me.”

At Bath, the Australian backs’ coach Brian Smith had serious reservations. He didn’t think Voyce was that good and encouraged him to pursue his career elsewhere, Bath were happy to let him go. Warren Gatland offered a two-year contract on a reduced salary at Wasps and off he went.

“My first impressions of Wasps, as a club, were very favourable. Everywhere in London was so expensive, I couldn’t afford to get a place and the club said they couldn’t afford to put me up in a hotel. So Lawrence Dallaglio said I could stay with him and that’s what I did for two months. Then I met Shaun Edwards, the assistant coach, and he was like this wise vicar, who had seen everything there was to see, and was brilliant at passing on what he’d learn t.

“Shaun taught me to me the game in a different way. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘Why could you not have done this?’ One of the first games I played for Wasps, I kicked really well from defence and found touch every time. ‘Why did you kick the ball into touch,’ Shaun asked. ‘Why didn’t you kick it long and keep it in play?’ All the time I was being challenged, and learning a new way of seeing things. I now feel I have an advantage over most of the guys I play against because I see the game in a more intelligent way.”

At Wasps they showed much besides. They noticed he did not take off his top when the weather was hot during pre-season training and knew it was because he was embarrassed by his underdeveloped physique. He had to sort that out, and he did. “At Bath, I felt I was the boy who had come through the ranks, kind of taken for granted maybe, whereas at Wasps I was judged on what I did and was allowed to be myself.”

HE MARRIED Nicola, the girl he had met in Bath, and they now live in Richmond, the Cornwall boy comfortable in one of London’s more fashionable southern suburbs. Though he is now a much better and more focused player, he is still the same Tom, easy-going and wonderfully laid back and he still fancies he can take most guys on the outside.

When it comes to the little games of poker they play at Wasps, he also fancies his chances and there is nothing he likes more than an afternoon’s racing at Ascot or Kempton or, best of all, an evening meeting at Windsor. Dutifully, he tries to keep his punting under control but you know it is hard. And sometimes, he just goes with his instinct.

He recalls the Wednesday evening in May last year, when the Lions were at Heathrow and he was at home with his Wasps teammate Paul Sackey watching the Champions League final. Half-time, Liverpool were three down and even though he is an Arsenal fan himself, he felt for Sackey who is a dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool red. It was then that Dallaglio rang from Heathrow.

Dallaglio is a Chelsea fan and the only reason he called was to wind up Sackey. “Not going too good for your boys, is it?” he said. What could Sackey say? “We’ll turn it round in the second half”? Hardly. But there was Voyce, urging his friend to believe and when they looked at one of the betting changes on the internet, someone had laid Liverpool at 75-1 to overturn their 3-0 deficit.

“They’ll do it,” said Voyce. “I have a feeling they will turn it round. He invested £30 and won £2,250. At the end of the match, they rang Dallaglio. “So what do you think now Lol?” The story and the absurd self-belief are pure Voyce. He is that kind of character: exuberant, confident, guileless, occasionally irritating but likeable — he believes, therefore he is.